Youthful energy in full bloom

Friday

Apr 25, 2014 at 6:00 AM

By Clive McFarlane TELEGRAM & GAZETTE STAFF

This spring has been a bit psychotic, quite likely on any given day to burden us with snow as it is to shower us with sunshine, and yet when it is true to its nature, like it was Tuesday, it is intoxicating and irresistible in its call to flower bulbs and the young alike.

To be sure, we adults are not immune to spring's call to life, but we all too often demur, stifling our stirring desires under an avalanche of responsibilities, or flat out denying our carefree yearnings with white lies, as I did Tuesday when I fled the office and journeyed to Green Hill Park and excused the act as being job-related.

Upon arriving, I wandered by the state-of-the-art Worcester Technical High School baseball field. With its manicured grounds and towering lights, it offered, it seemed, an irresistible opportunity for a pick-up game by young men with spring coursing through their veins. The field, however, was empty, and silent, a melancholic reminder, perhaps, of how schedules and organized play can stifle the improvisation of the young.

But while baseball might be spring's ambassador, the season will find life wherever it resides, and on this day, life was being lived by a group of boarders and BMX bikers at a skate park just across from the baseball field.

Worcester resident Nick Arcuri, 20, was among them. Specks of dirt and grease on his arms and clothing telegraphed his day job as a demolition worker, but his world was clearly still defined more by defiance than acquiescence.

"Whoa," he said suddenly, having noticed a fellow biker completing a back flip.

"That was sick."

His explanation for his thirst to create three-dimensional impressions on the concrete and iron canvases skateboarders and BMX riders call street plazas and bowls was succinct.

"The adrenaline," he said.

"I have played soccer and football and they are cool, but someone is always telling you what you can and cannot do in those sports. Here, I do what I please. There is no one yelling at you to do this, or to do that. You create your own pace, your own vision. Everybody is different."

That is perhaps what makes Nick, and most other young people I would imagine, the perfect foil for spring.

He is not hampered by his responsibilities, nor is he self-conscious about giving in to his urges to catch air, to twist and turn and somersault in a waltz with his bike or skateboard, to defy gravity in search of "the zone" in which thinking vanishes and "doing" dominates.

Neither is he deterred in knowing that what goes up must come down and that a crash could create "disharmonies," such as when a biker uses his face "to collect samples of the local geology (cranial disharmony)," or when a biker's jaw and his handlebars "attempt to occupy the same space and time (mandibular disharmony)."

"I have broken both my collarbones, and I have wrecked my ankles countless times," he told me, as if he was discussing a collection of medallions, instead of injuries.

"My (damaged) ankle kept me out for two years. I had to work it, with weights, to get back. That's how it is. If you fall, you got to get back up."

If Nick reminds us of ourselves when we were young, perhaps we should ask ourselves why, as we grow older, we tend to squeeze the adventures out of life with the imposition of all our schedules and controls?

Some will say it is maturity.

But could it be that as we grow older we become too concerned about our vulnerabilities, too consumed with seeking assurances that might arrest the impact of us falling down, too afraid to allow spring to stir the youth in us?